Digital cameras are widely used to acquire high resolution still image photographs. Digital video cameras are also used to record home videos, television programs, movies, concerts, or sports events on a magnetic disk or optical DVD for storage or transmission through communications channels. Some commercial cameras are able to take both digital video and digital still image photographs. However, most of these cameras required a user to switch between a video recording mode and a digital still image mode. Separate pipelines are generally used for each of the video recording and still image modes. Examples of these cameras include SANYO ID-SHOT® and CANNON POWERSHOT S300®. The SANYO ID-SHOT® uses an optical disk, whereas the CANNON POWERSHOT S300® uses synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM). However, both cameras are still image cameras that have the capability of taking video clips, using separate pipelines.
Other cameras use a single software pipeline to acquire both digital video and low quality still images by taking one of the video frames as is, and storing the particular video frame as a high resolution still image. Examples of such cameras include JVC GR-DVL9800®, which is a digital video camera that allows a user to take a picture at certain point in time. However, the pictures taken generally are of low quality, because a low resolution video pipeline is used to generate the high resolution still image pictures.
When still images are acquired in burst mode, current cameras try to process both pipelines independently. If a single hardware processing pipeline is used, a large frame buffer may be needed to store video frames while the burst mode still images are processed. However, a large frame buffer is costly, and build up delay on the video side may be undesirable.
Other cameras try brute force real time processing, which is costly.